How will Virginia colleges and universities fare going forward against a national backdrop of declining college enrollment? Luke Juday offers an interesting perspective at the Stat Chat blog, noting that the post-18-year-old age cohort is expected to shrink over the next two decades. Writes Juday:
If we think about the graduating high school seniors who might be entering college, there would have been close to 4.6 million 18 year-olds in 2009. Five years later, there are only 4.2 million – And the 17 year-olds preparing for college are the smallest age cohort younger than 35 – at 4,176,000. The next set of them (current 16 year-olds) will be even smaller. In fact, we should expect a slowly declining pool of college-aged students for the foreseeable future, as illustrated by the graph [above].
So far, Virginia’s public and private universities seem to be bucking the trend, experiencing a small enrollment increase overall during the 2012-2013 year, according to the State Council for Higher Education in Virginia. However some universities — most notably Virginia Commonwealth University, Norfolk State University and Virginia State University — saw significant declines. It’s dangerous to draw conclusions from one year’s worth of data, however, so those numbers may or may not reflect longer-term trends.
Juday also notes that Hispanic and African-American children will constitute a growing share of the college-bound population. Insofar as those two demographic groups have been less likely to attend college than non-Hispanic whites, whether due to lower average income or other reasons, the changing racial make-up of the student population may crimp enrollments as well.
Combine declining enrollments with relentlessly increasing tuition, fees and other college expenses, and it’s hard to see how even Virginia’s vaunted undergraduate higher-ed system will be able to maintain its numbers. Norfolk State and Virginia State have been experiencing well-publicized difficulties. Don’t be surprised to see problems surfacing at other institutions, especially those that have borrowed heavily to build new facilities.
Update: The National Center for Educational Statistics projects that enrollment growth at American colleges and universities will increase by three million between 2012 and 2022. That represents a considerable slowdown from the past, but an increase nonetheless. The projections do not account, however, for “the cost of a college education, the economic value of an education, and the impact of distance learning due to technological changes.” (Hat tip: Matt Thornhill.)
— JAB
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